[SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode?

[James Sumner]

Hi Paul and everyone

More a survey of concerns than a historical study, but:

Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme, "ASCII imperialism". In Martha Lampland 
and Susan Leigh Star (eds.), /Standards and their stories: How 
quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday 
life/, pp.177-199. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. PDF copy at 
<http://danielpargman.blogspot.co.uk/p/texts.html>

(Searching on the term "ASCII imperialism", incidentally, turns up a 
1999 text suggesting it was first coined by the Finnish 
library/information activist Mikael Böök -- who is himself uncommonly 
difficult to search on precisely because of the ASCII problem...)

Best
James

On 20/08/2015 16:00, Paul N.Edwards wrote:
> All, vaguely related to the interesting discussion of race - on which 
> I tend to agree with Tom H - here’s something that’s been niggling 
> away at my historical consciousness.
>
> In 1993 Jeffrey Shapard published an intriguing article about the 
> problems created by early standardization on ASCII 7- and 8-bit 
> character codes for Asian and other non-alphabetic languages, which 
> can have many thousands of characters (vs. the 256 representable in 
> 8-bit ASCII). Shapard, “Islands in the (Data) Stream: Language, 
> Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in Japan,” in Linda Harasim, 
> ed., /Global networks: Computers and international communication/ (MIT 
> Press Cambridge, MA., 1993).
>
> This problem carried over into the Web era. It was technically 
> resolved by Unicode, but that standard has still not been universally 
> adopted.
>
> I’m wondering whether any historians have written about the history of 
> character encoding, especially Unicode. What I’m curious about is not 
> the technical history itself, but how the character-code problem 
> affected/was affected by culture (“electronic isolation," as per 
> Shapard? indigenous efforts, vs. IBM’s world-market goals? alternative 
> pathways?). Do any of you know archive- or interview-based accounts 
> that go into some of the cultural and social background and implications?
>
> NB, there was a 3-part history of IBM's efforts in Asia, especially 
> kanji representations, in the IEEE Annals of the History of 
> Computing, Jan.-March 2005, by: Hensch, K.; Iqi, T.; Iwao, M.; Oda, 
> A.; Takeshita.
>
> There are also number of rather thorough and interesting histories by 
> developer-protagonists and users, such as these:
>
> S. Searle, A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, 
> Europe, and Asia <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html>
>
> S. Searle, Unicode Revisited 
> <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html>
>
> J. Becker, Unicode 88 
> <http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf> (1988 proposal from 
> Xerox PARC)
>
> Curious for any thoughts or references.
>
> Best,
>
> Paul
>
>
> —————————————————
> Paul N. Edwards, Professor of Information 
> <http://www.si.umich.edu> and History <http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>
> On sabbatical July-December 2015 — replies will be slow or nonexistent
>
> Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/>. Here's why! 
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